Don’t open the details in a modal window, have it be a separate page(youdontneedamodalwindow.dev) |
Don’t open the details in a modal window, have it be a separate page(youdontneedamodalwindow.dev) |
Modals have their use and function. Don't overdo it and maybe even provide non-modal options in addition to the modal.
I really don't get it. We're doing mostly SPAs, so any back-button would be as fast as closing the modal.
Sprinting along delightfully, getting everything right, every piston firing... then falls on face at the last hurdle.
No, don't put forms in modals, gah!
Alerts
Confirmation dialogs
Forms for creating/updating entitiesIt's sadly reasonable not to expect users to trust, or even try, the back button.
I refuse to read anything that is said after the example being useless.
Linking to a separate page is like GOTO control flow. You leave it up to the user to figure out where to go from there, but the user usually doesn’t know the full sequence of steps that are part of a task. It’s your responsibility to guide them.
2. once again, there is a failure here to recognize which use cases are best served by a website (i.e., a set of web pages that use native browser navigation) or by a single-page application (which takes native UI paradigms such as multiple windows and modals and implements them using web technologies)
3. blanket criticism for single-page applications often comes from people who have no real understanding of web development and harbor nostalgia for the "good old days" when browsers acted only as display devices for server-generated HTML strings; those people aren't worth arguing with, I don't have time for them, I'd rather spend my time improving web technologies so that more people can implement applications that feel "native" yet work across different architectures, devices, screen sizes, languages, and writing directions, built on top of a platform that is privacy-centric by default, and not controlled by a single company
/MyResource/123 (all operations happen here as various "Modes")
vs
/MyResource/123/View
/MyResource/123/Export
/MyResource/123/EditPropertyA
/MyResource/123/EditPropertyB
/MyResource/123/Delete
etc...
One other benefit to using full routable pages for your various views is that you can subdivide the work a lot more easily. Assuming you have some common layout/style system (which you absolutely should), you can realistically part out the dev work at the grain of a URL at a time. We still have a few modals, but they are all of the "confirm scary operation XYZ" variety.
Modals can definitely be bookmarkable if they are dependent on a certain path or query param to appear.
> Modal windows can be used for views that don't constitute a "resource" or correspond to a domain entity: > [...] > Forms for creating/updating entities
Wow, in my opinion this a perfect example where a separate page IS still superior to a modal: how much better a "create issue" jira PAGE is vs the modal?
You can also take a hybrid approach: many calendar apps have a small popup for adding an event that the user can expand into a whole (nonmodal) window for editing all the details.
We use modal windows specifically for this reason (for our payment application's checkout page).
Also using a modal significantly improves the checkout experience in case of SDK flows for payment methods like Klarna, Google pay etc.
Personally I feel modal windows are better aligned to the user's flow of attention. We also have redirection flows for these payment methods to open the authentication page in a new tab but we pick the modal flow ever single time for a better experience.
You can get a feel of what I'm talking about over here: https://demo-hyperswitch.netlify.app/checkout
Another reason might be to avoid losing state on the underlying page.
If you have a "SPA" style app, it might obviate both of these reasons. In an SPA app (ideally one with good URL and back button behavior of course) the difference between a modal window and a separate page perhaps becomes _only_ one of UX, which presentation is better?
But in a more traditional server-side-rendered app with minimal UI-focused JS, other considerations still exist which are legitimate, it seems to me.
Those are rare. So much easier to mess up than to match native browser UX.
That may sound like gibberish if you're not familiar with Phoenix LiveView, but it all makes sense and it just works.
Just make it so that you can copy-paste the URL and you will see the same page with the same modal openen.
Why is there a completely untested assumption that everything should be linkable?
You don't need most of the cruft that clutters "modern" webpages. While not solely responsible, ever more "clever design" has certainly contributed to the status quo, where we load upwards 30MB of garbage to display <10 lines of information.
Loading a new page, new tab, or simply navigating fully away to a new editing screen are all pretty heavy disorienting actions for something that could be pretty light.
But it's related to the amount of work being done in the modal.
For a very small amount of work (e.g. editing a single text field), inline-editing would be best; for a lot of work (e.g. composing a bunch of textboxes and including other data, etc) a dedicated page is best.
A modal belongs somewhere in-between - editing a few things at once, in context of other things.
"Can this modal be an inline-edit?" <-- first question I'd ask. If the answer is No:
"Will the work being done on the modal take more than 2 minutes to do?" <--- then I'd consider a separate page.
But things in-between seem perfect for a modal.
https://marmelab.com/react-admin-demo/#/reviews
When clicking on a review, the detail appear on the same page. This allows to quickly browse through reviews, and preview some before doing batch edition. It's super effective.
Notice that you can bookmark any review detail, too.
The article should have been called "I dont need a modal window".
That’s not a modal window, though. Modal windows are overlays [0] over the main page, here it’s to the side.
Literally in the example the modal covers 100% of the view state. Most modals cover a big portion of the state.
And I don't see why the modal needs to be limited to quick jobs like inline edits. It could be the place where the bulk of the tasks are done.
Modals done well can remove anxiety and uncertainty from the user.
One example that comes to mind having just bought plane tickets is that the plane ticket flow could be an underlying all-on-one-page UI (flight -> seats -> payment) where each section opens as a form modal on top of that state. You can close modals, open previous sections, edit completed sections, where the modals communicated that you're not losing state by navigating between forms. One of the best UX aspects of the modal is seeing the underlying state behind it and behind able to click out of the modal to return to it.
Meanwhile, when buying tickets 30 min ago, the airline website had a sequence of pages where, I found out, going back to make an edit on a previous page reset the state of the subsequent pages. Obviously they could improve that without modals, but modals communicate state preservation by their nature.
Modals get too much hate just because they can be done poorly. Most UX is done poorly and that's not a reason to wash your hands of it.
but then you can't reference the thread without closing the modal (and likely losing all progress)
This will worsen the UX more often than not. Guaranteed.
All complaints on the page are ultimately grievances against poorly thought-through implementations and as such they are rooted in the wrong thing. It's trivial to complement every modal window with a standalone version, in which case it's possible to bookmark them, middle-click on the links and what have you.
Start with the user experience, craft your implementation around that and all will be fine. Including the modal windows.
> Modal windows can't be bookmarked or shared as links
Why would the user want to bookmark or share a "modal". I believe the author is confusing a modal with a details page (a customer's details page in a CRM for example) on that we can agree that that kind of content is best shown on a separate page. A modal serves a specific function within a web page, be it a website or a web app. Its main function is to allow the user to perform certain tasks within a page, and those tasks will immediately reflect on the underlying page upon submission (or validation/confirmation ..etc). So I fail to understand why the author thinks a user would want to bookmark that modal.
> Modal windows can't be opened in a new tab
Nor should they. Modals, as mentioned above, are one layer above an underlying page, and they either show complimentary information related to an element within that page, or they allow to user to performa task. So they should inherently be accessible within the same tab, not a new one.
> Modal windows make the Back button confusing
Aside from the Close/Abort button inside the modal, a lot of interaction designers and front-end developers are now developing the modals in a way they would close if you press the back button of your browser. No confusion there in my opinion.
> Modal windows are hard to get right[...]if you need to support older browsers, good luck.
Can't find the date this article was published but I assume it's old because almost all new browsers support at least <dialog> element [1]
Modals are a double edged sword, like any UI component or UX pattern really.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/di...
Further reading: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/modal-nonmodal-dialog/
For example, a user may want to edit a few items items in a list Rather than forcing the user to a new page to do each edit, you can pop up a modal and edit in place. With new pages, the user loses the context of the original list. The page swapping is very disruptive.
Lmao, I was making this point at work yesterday. It's really difficult to justify using a modal if you care about accessibility. It's not that it's impossible to do correctly, but even when it's done "correctly" it can still be confusing for users navigating with keyboards / screen readers. So modals are almost always either too much effort to do right, or just not the best approach.
Another thing I'd add to this list is that there are some people who browse without JS enabled. I know it's unpopular to care about those folks these days, but it is another reason to avoid modals where possible.
I hit a bug where if I closed the popup (for a ticket on a board) it just reopened! And some ticket links don’t work. All these bugs and complexity for what?
Maybe the browsers should have a built in “open link as popup” for the rare times you want that. And the sites just make it a new page always.
Just pop up a modal and reload the Issue/Bug state when done.
That said the modal load is just as slow.
A modal is not, in itself, an overaly, window, frame, etc. Generally, it really shouldn't even be used as a noun. Modal describes the state of the interface. Most interfaces allow for multiple user interactions originating from the broader interface, i.e., it is multi-modal.
Sometimes, it is necessary to put the UI into a single-purpose state, so, in a single mode. This is required when two interactions can interfere with one another. When one interaction must not be interrupted by another, we must go modal.
The author seems to be chiefly complaining about unnecessary modality and the way that gives rise to clunky UIs that don't allow for things like linking. That's rooted in conflating on-screen, 3D elements like overlay dialog boxes with the concept of one of some interface being modal. An example of this would be an interface with a item list that, on item selection, conjures a modal overlay dialog box with the item details. In the base case, there is no dependency problem here, i.e., it's an entirely acceptable design to allow a user to view the details of two items at the same time, and therefor it doesn't call for a modal detail interface.
What is a modal?
You are confusing it with the much less common but technically accurate meaning in UI. So you are just confused by terminology, and even though it would be better if people stick to unambiguous words, they are talking about something well defined enough that discussing terminology isn't useful.
Run it through user testing and see how your users actually react to new windows being opened all the time. A lot of them are going to be confused, and not be able to make it back to your site. Modals are popular because they work
and at least in my use, the modal is always the better choice there. especially since the advent of <dialog>
https://modalzmodalzmodalz.com/
MODALZMODALZMODALZ.COM
>We use too many damn modals. Let's just not. Help
>The bad news: Modals are the crutch of the inarticulate designer and developer. [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645447
>bedatadriven on June 25, 2020 | next [–]
>I was just about to share this our designer, who is always talking me down from modals, when I reached the bottom and discovered that our designer is in fact the author.
>I seriously can't say enough for this message. Adrian helped us redesign our app 2 years ago, dispatching many many modals in the process, and delivering a huge increase in usability that our customers and users very much do care about.
Modals are often fine for dialogs and fleeting interactions that happen within the context of the page you are on. Those often don't need their own URL. Don't need to persist after a page refresh, shouldn't be shared, confusingly pollute browser history and benefit from instant loading.
I mostly agree with the author in their examples. If it walks like a page and it talks like a page, it probably should be a page. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater otherwise.
> Modal windows can be used for views that don't constitute a "resource" or correspond to a domain entity:
- Alerts
- Confirmation dialogs
- Forms for creating/updating entities
Compare Safari's Open File to Chrome's Open File. Chrome's Open File modal cannot be moved. Safari's can.
If you have a modal, and it blocks content, you have to be willing to say "I want to prevent my users from seeing this content while dealing with the modal. The content that is being blocked is not important, and it serves NO purpose."
You don't even necessarily need to place it in a new page, probably you can just expand it inline.
Most modals are just lazy.
"Where should I put this piece of UI/information?"
"Just place it above everything else."
With SPAs you don't even have an excuse that "a full-page reload will take longer" because you can change the whole page/layout instantly.
Which opens a whole new can of worms!
What is the meaning of pressing "back" when modal window is shown? Is it "cancel"? What if I already changed something within the modal? What if "back" causes losing some input within the modal? Should we... show another modal for confirmation of going back?
Same with navigation via "back"/"forward" into a modal (which is now present on the history stack) - if this was modal with some action... can I execute it again? Did I just execute it by navigating into it?
If I think about the engineering product I work on and where they do have modals, none of them would work with a separate page. It's things like "Load one or more of your saved graphs (which you can search and filter) into this existing page of graphs"
There is no question that a design gets easier to parse for users when it is serialized by modality. Likewise, serialization is dramatically easier for implementors since it eliminates the need for concurrent execution.
Context matters. Those choices have strong historical reasons for their existence in operating systems and their user interfaces. However, they have little place for being emulated on the web.
Why? Because they give rise to all manner of bad implementation such as the fact that linking structures have not grown at the pace they should have, particularly as it relates to documentation.
All you have to do is look at Amazon's constant proxy to "click here, click there" as a sad excuse for why HCIs don't scale at the same rate as APIs and you can condemn a large portion of the last two decades of design on the internet since these patterns have been copied ad nauseum but only exist because we've employed tools that automated their creation when a link has always been worth a thousand words of "click here, click there".
REST applies to HCIs as much or more than APIs.
It’s the kind of bold, blanket statement that sounds really great and is a fun opinion to hold, but when confronted with reality crumbles (as many statements of that kind do).
Such as the Nielsen Norman Group.
> "Do not use modal dialogs for nonessential information that is not related to the current user flow."
> From https://www.nngroup.com/articles/modal-nonmodal-dialog/
Nonessential information such as, let's say, "details."
I'd say that this minisite is exactly on point.
Small messages that need to be brought to the user's attention and a simple "OK"/"Cancel" button? Yes, this is a good fit. That's what modal windows were originally created for.
You can do the same on a desktop app too, but it is less commonly done. To further avoid confusion, try make sure the pop-up modal appears over the parent window that it is blocking input for (this may mean coding your own window instead of the platform default alert/confirmation box, if the call to open one doesn't allow positioning information to be specified). I've seen alerts/confirmations pop-up on a different screen to the one that the parent window is on which makes missing it much easier (especially if the other screen is away from the main one, perhaps it is being projected at a wall for a demo). To further help: if the user clicks the disabled parent, move the pop-up to where they clicked – usually the title-bar or other chrome on the pop-up flashes in this case, but that isn't helpful if it is on screen 2 and the user is staring intently at screen 1.
The thing gets implemented and the users like how fast the data is shown. But can we just add some action buttons like Accept and Reject instead of the Ok button? Why close the modal and then hit an action button when you can have them right there?
The buttons get implemented, the users love it. Manager comes back, but can we edit one or two fields? Sure. Some of the fields will open a modal to let users select the value. Should we reimplement it as a regular page so we don't have a modal in another modal? Manager: No, that will take forever. Validation, error messages, scrollbars?
The manager refuses to fix it because he burned through all the allocated time and he doesn't want to have a difficult discussion with the stakeholders. And anyway, in these meetings the developers are not invited and he can just blame the developers because everybody knows how entitled they are.
> Modal windows can be used for views that don't constitute a "resource" or correspond to a domain entity:
> Alerts
> Confirmation dialogs
> Forms for creating/updating entities
> Because it looked good in the mockup
Indeed, tools like Figma can create a dangerous illusion of simplicity. I wonder how much time and effort has been wasted during the actual software development process, despite the initial, marginal savings in mockup design.
One must also take in account that the hourly rates for developers are typically higher than those of UI designers, so that it doesn't make much sense to increase productivity of the latter at the expense of the former.
I have lots of frustration with modal views that: 1. block me from seeing the things that I probably need to enter into the view 2. disappear when you accidentally click outside them 3. don't scroll properly 4. don't allow scrolling of the page behind 5. don't play well with reasonable browser extensions (uBlock, but other things as well like Disconnect) or even the tracking prevention build into browsers. 6. store data in a weird place so that a second window of the same site in a different location opens the same (now incorrect) data in the modal.
These things are becoming super common in line-of-business apps, where they interrupt workflow. Better options:
1. New page, as recommended by this link 2. Expanding a region of interest to allow the form to fit 3. Making the page more interactive in other ways so that a modal doesn't seem like the best way to do the interaction
Once you get how it works it’s neat.
SPA page loads can get really slow, which can frustrate or disorient users. Having too many page loads to sequentially drill down your info architecture can get really annoying for users. If your pages are 1 or 2 layers deep in your architecture, and the rest is shown in some way within the page (again, modals are one way to do it), as a piece of "fleeting information", your users will appreciate it.
The location changes are virtual through the history API, with a reload just causing the SPA to start from that location instead of from the root/home view.
AWS Management Console begs to differ:)
The article states very clearly the use cases for which modals make sense:
Modal windows can be used for views that don't constitute a "resource" or correspond to a domain entity:
- Alerts
- Confirmation dialogs
- Forms for creating/updating entities
These feel incredibly unrelated to me. Why does that matter at all for the display choice? A modal is getting used because it's a view into another section of the application that doesn't lose the current location of the user.
Further - users (and I mean normal paying users, not HN commentators) rarely ever give a shit about URLs. It's just not important to most people what the string of characters is.
So...
Anywhere you've got multiple steps to complete, or an adjacent resource that might be related and viewed/edited in the context of the parent resource.
Or a form is being filled in and a user wants to enable extras, which requires filling in a different form, etc...
The modal is about not losing the current place for the user. Because most current users don't use multiple tabs/windows for the same product, and they don't pay any attention to the urls.
"Dont open a modal" in cases where the user is likely going to get lost in a detour otherwise is bad advice.
Alerts don't need to stop the world.
Confirmation dialogs block examining the things that you want to confirm.
And forms for creating anything do not need to block access to the rest of the page.
In fact, you can make a link open modal with left click but open in new tab with middle click. I think it is the most balanced way in my opinion.
Modal and tab can co-exist. They are not really mutually exclusive.
BTW, social media websites generally implements this in their feed view. A image behaves different when you click it with middle or left click.
This is yet another instance of optimizing for something that can not be made perfect. Let me decide what I want. Give me the option to do both without much of a hassle. If a decision needs to be made regarding what should happen on a mouse-click, one may choose a sensible default (i.e. what is the most typical use-case), while leaving the option to configure the other choice.
You can always argue that many options are a non-goal, but any sufficiently sophisticated software needs training anyway. Configuration can be a part of that. Nothing is worse than a program in which the designer chose to make your use-case to be painful to be met.
Furthermore, a uri does not need to be bound to a view. In fact, one might prefer different ways to look at the same data.
Voice control software is used most often by people with limited use of their hands, verbal commands replace keyboard and cursor control inputs.
> Standard browser controls are all 100% accessible by default.
Unfortunately, this is not entirely true. For instance, `select` elements and their options don't reflow in most browsers. It is true that the native elements are much more accessible than most alternatives developers create.
If 99.99% of your target audience is not using screen readers, then you need to decide if worsening their experience to accommodate the other 0.01% aligns with your project plans and goals.
In some cases it will, in some it won't. It depends.
Just make a good non-modal view, with whatever transition is needed for continuity to/from the parent view.
As a principle, I don't read any website that has a modal window, especially a modal "subscribe to our newsletter".
Experience shows that this is not the case, provided you keep load times as lowest as possible.
In business apps, this has the additional advantage of allowing users to share information among themselves by simply sharing URLs.
You must use "telemetry" instead of actually talking to your users.
My company requires me to talk to the people who use the web sites I build. (I has a session just yesterday.) They hate modal windows. They even still refer to them as "pop-ups."
There's two words you must learn when talking about UI design - "It Depends".
The one general rule I will state that guides towards using a modal is if the user needs to stay within the context of the originating page and they must return to that page as part of the workflow that launched the modal. But there's also edge cases to this.
source: UXer with 25 years experience in both desktop and webapp.
I mean, there are several people in this thread who like modals as users. I’m another one of those. I find modals very useful, as long as you don’t do them in a crappy way. You shouldn’t insult people just because your experience was different.
I however agree with you, and I don't like the website simply dismissing the idea because it's been over-used and abused all over the place.
Modals have a place in UX.
It is what is wrong with web-designers. They throw away existing browser features, like a scrollbar, and develop their own half-baked replacements, which work differently, they are probably incomplete realisation, and then I'm scratching my head trying to imagine a reason for all this work done by a developer: why to spend additional development time to make my life worse?
It could be a UX improvement, if it was not a modal window but a modeless one: it can help to compare details of different products by placing their windows side-by-side. Or I can right-click on a link and open it in a new window. But a modal window is a nightmare: I can move tabs into a separate browser window easily and to place them side-by-side. It is pain to do it with modal windows. One needs to clone tab and then to open modals.
There's one kind of modality needed for computers, and it's the power switch.
``` history.pushState({}, "", "/new-url"); ```
Moreover, modals serve one very important UI purpose in that they keep the user's mind in a context.
I prefer master-detail views. Like an Email client, where you select a message in a list and then see the body of the email. For smartphone sized screens this should switch to a detail page with a back button. Like the Mail app on iPhone/iPad.
Master-detail can be tough on server side rendered pages though. And you really need a good page structure, because you show a lot of data on one page and it can look cluttered quickly.
It sounds like you agree with the article, at least according to my reading.
The author states that you should not use a modal for something “bookmarkable”, such as a details page.
They also state that a modal is suitable for performing an action that does not warrant a “resource URL”, such as a “create resource” form.
I think you and the author are making the same argument. I'm sure you've encountered one of those everything-is-a-modal apps and thought "I sure wish I could link to this part of the app but I can't." Then you'd wish you could bookmark the modal.
I use one every day. An example: to edit a user's account information, I go to the accounts interface, open the filters modal dialog and supply the criteria, and them I'm presented with a list of matches. I select one, and it opens the account information in modal dialog. None of those intermediate states are addressable in any way, so it's a real chore to ever access any resource, and I certainly can't share a link with someone else. This is a truly bad experience directly because of its abuse of modal dialogs.
Because the modal contains specific information they want to come back to, or share with others.
> I believe the author is confusing a modal with a details page
The problem against which the author is invecting is precisely the use of modals where details pages would be appropriate.
> Nor should they
How about you stop making decisions for me. I very often want to open settings and other various dialogues in a new tab or as a saved bookmark. This is especially useful in customer support (which is a concept a lot of startups are unfamiliar with, to be fair). You are unaware of every use case, so choose standard browser behavior when possible.
I'm not sure how this justifies your opinion. The fact that "a lot" of people are following a new design paradigm indicates, to me at least, that the pattern is inherently confusing. As a user, do I know what paradigm was used by the design and engineering team? If not, I'm going to be unsure about the effect of clicking "back"
In this case I'd consider expanding the item on the page when preforming an edit. That way it's clear to the user they're on the same page so won't be tempted to click back and you won't need to worry about confusing keyboard / screen reader users.
Alternatively if you absolutely need to use a modal consider a slide out instead. Slide outs tend to look less like new pages and reduce the likelihood of a user clicking back to "go back" to whatever they were previously looking at. With a slide out the original content is still in view, but now you have some extra options to the side. You still have all the accessibility issues of course, but the UX is slightly better most of the time.
For example, you are running a project review meeting and want to quickly jump between tickets on the kanban board. Your main business context is the entire board (you might have filters/sorting), and you keep a mental record of where interesting tickets are placed on the screen. However, during the group discussion, you need to quickly jump into an individual ticket to reassign it or scan through comments for 5 seconds. In this case, using a modal to show ticket details is preferred to redirecting to a separate 'details' page because it does not scramble the user's context and their mental model about what's on the screen. Of course, the UI still should support cmd+click to open a full page dedicated to that ticket, but that's a 10% use-case.
Also, if you click on something in the modal, you end up getting redirected to a new page anyways, which kind of supports the anti-modal argument.
OTOH, I like Wikipedia's hover previews just fine, so sometimes they're OK.
It’s crazy how much the web platform’s lack of UI expressivity has set us back. Everything is constantly getting desperately reinvented out of a handful of text markup tags cobbled together by scripts, but it doesn’t solve any of the underlying issues.
Also, you're going to have to create modals eventually, alerts are needed in most applications so you might as well create a thorough component.
Avoiding modals because of those who browse with JS disabled doesn't make much sense. Especially when they can temporarily enable on your site, as disabling JS for security reasons would mean they trust your site if they're still using it enough to reach a modal. You can still create fallbacks, but they'll be ugly considering most modals are for nested form changes or alerts.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/di...
I try to give it a best effort, but won’t e.g. rebuild a menu as an HTML checkbox just because some folks are hardliners about running Javascript.
Not before reading your comment I had realized I never missed those extra buttons, or at least remembering missing them.
And I realize that while my implementation takes care of modifiers to open links in new tabs on my web apps, I always overlooked middle button.
The real problem though is that the web is very broken for building apps, and that the DOM API is missing a way to negociate the url changes on default clicked link behavior instead of the current «block event and update url» mechanism.
A few times I’ve encountered sites trying to be clever and detect Ctrl+click or middle-click and use window.open(), but this doesn’t behave natively: natively, middle-click or Ctrl+click probably open in a background tab, but open() opens a foreground tab, which will always be disruptive for people that use this stuff much, and sometimes infuriating.
This isn’t the only reason for having real links; there are also things like status bar text on hover, and context menu on right click or long press, which may include options like Open Link in New Private Window that cannot be emulated in any way.
If you want to intercepting link click events, you must check if the click is modified in some way like this:
if (event.button || event.altKey || event.ctrlKey || event.metaKey || event.shiftKey) return;
It makes me furious
As for <a href="#">, it’s in the same boat, with the sole exception of jumping to the top of the page.
Which I thought made sense but I have missed an ok modal before myself let alone seen others as another commenter pointed out. In native apps they also open off screen which is about as broken as you can get.
So, I may go even further than the article and say there are even fewer cases where it is the best way to do a job.
This is one of my main points: good UX takes some thought. It's harder than doing the bare minimum. In this case, preserving someone's post in a <textarea> is the same concern whether it's in a modal or stuck at the bottom of the page. Neither using a modal nor not using a modal solve this for you.
It usually makes sense to introduce a localstorage draft system regardless of where the <textarea> appears on a forum.
If you try to perform bulk edits, it'll bring you to a brand new page with all the items you want to modify, and ask you to click some things ("what kind of X should I do to these tickets"). You click stuff and hit Submit, and it goes to yet another new page with all the tickets and asks you to select more things. Then you click Submit, and it brings you to yet another new page where you click another set of things, and hit Submit. 3 entirely new page loads, and then you go back to the original page.
You can't hyperlink to any of these pages because they're part of a bulk edit applying to many items in intermediate states. Each page load takes at least 5 seconds. You can't see any of the context of where you were before, and when you go finally go back, you lose some of what you were doing/displaying before.
A modal would be much faster because the entire page wouldn't need to reload 3 times, you already can't bookmark specific sections in the new pages, and if you wanted to cancel the operation you could get back to the original page much faster (technically you're already on it), with the original context of the original page still intact.
Most airline flows do preserve this information.
Now, native browser modals (think Javascript's alert()) don't use the same underlying technology as HTML/CSS modals (think Bootstrap's modal component), but at the end of the day they're both modals/pop-ups.
There are too many to list here. Things that the sort of people who read HN would never imagine.
One is that a surprising number of users don't know to press the "Search" button after they enter text into a search field. They will just sit there for a bit and when nothing happens, they assume it's broken.
I haven't followed up on this yet, but I suspect it's because people have gotten so used to autocomplete.
They sure do. Especially modal dialogs. Everybody has been trained to hit okay automatically, because they're so prevalent on things that don't matter. Good apps track history and have undo.
Apps that have changes that matter use more drastic things than modal dialogs. Just try deleting things on AWS.
Such questions as "if I close this modal is that different from using the cancel button?" should not even need to be dealt with by the user.
It's similarly annoying as paging controls that don't support "open in new window" and/or don't work with the browser history.
- I *want* more details on a separate, linkable URL.
- I *want* it to open in either the same window, or a separate window if I ctrl+click it.
"Subscribe to newsletter" use case is just the worst use case.
The problem that designers are often trying to solve is that there is not enough information that there is a good way to put it on its own page - it's too small for its own page but too large for the table that we'd rather just add another column to.
We have an export button so you can get all the details in excel or LibreOffice or your tool of choice, though. And in a better world, we'd be writing proper desktop apps instead of web applications so that we aren't making stupid compromises like this, but here we are.
Sounds wonderful.
I never made any blanket assumptions and never wrote "Users hate modal windows."
Reading is fundamental.
I have never met that other kind of user.
Even when it's a small detail completely embedded on the context of the page, people get annoyed by modals. AFAIK, that happens on the desktop too (with the single exception of things like app settings).
I do believe in pushing a more usable design despite users not liking it a few times. But those times have to be few, and thus, you have to get a lot of extra usability out of it. Modal details isn't such an important use case, so I do recommend to avoid unless you gather your own evidence (and any UI recommendation can be ignored if you gather your own evidence), even if they are better.
I do recommend a default to avoid almost all of the use-cases people are posting for modals:
- click to enlarge is much better done inline;
- alerts are that one thing where modals became a caricature, modal alerts are absolutely shit;
- confirmation prompts should be avoided as much as you can (yeah, if you can't, make a modal);
- the 2 minutes rule from the OP, nope, if it can't be done inline, you can put it in another page.
It's unrealistic to outline all the different thought processes that would go into such a decisionn in a short comment on HN. And you could not hope to cover all the different things it depends on.
That's it. That's what it is. You're arguing with accepted terminology. "Well actually, do ships really have beams, isn't that a light thing?" doesn't really get far either.
Now, about the terminology: why does the element have to float over other content? In-line modal interfaces are very common.
when people say ‘modal’ or ‘modal window’ or ‘modal pop up’ what they mean is: a new element in the same window, that overlays the current view, and must be dealt with before returning to the underlying page.
There are exceptions, but generally speaking that’s what ‘a modal’ is in the context of web ui.
Here's a common case for web application in-line modal forms, which are certainly not exceptional: airline ticket purchase flows.
I think Bootstrap is a reasonably standard Modal implementation. This site[1] contains an explanation of usage and demonstrations.
[1] https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.0/components/modal/#live-dem...
On large applications, this can be become a nightmare to maintain.
Modals were the spot where I threw in the towel on perfect progressive enhancement. Like yes, I could make this work without JavaScript. But I'm not willing to take the likely weeks designing and building a robust solution for it which would definitely have to involve routing.
I like OP's post, because this is a decision I am wrestling with. Right now I only use modals for things like confirmation windows or showing a larger version of a photo when you click a thumbnail. Kind of like the use cases they outline. Ephemeral. But I am about to start implementing a payment flow that is more complex than just "enter your card number and hit enter", and as nice as I think it would be to have it in a modal, but having it as its own page/flow is so much easier in so many different ways, I think this tipped me over the edge.
It's absolutely possible to build maintainable, accessible, linkable, fast modals.
I have no clue why someone would say those things are impossible or impossibly difficult to achieve.
Article mentions some.
And please notice that we are not advocating for the complete elimination of modals; rather, to avoid their use in specific situations.
I know how to close a tab, be it via keyboard shortcut or mouse click. I know how to resize it. I know how to print it. When content I want to glimpse at opens in a modal, I know none of that. Even if it is well designed, different sites will have different engagement paradigms.
My current pet peeve with modals is when I try to select text with the mouse, and drag past the edge of the modal, it closes.
Modal windows and how they interact with the user is obviously something that should be standardized, but that is a different discussion.
It already is. It's called tabs.
Just don't.
> Just don't.
Except where it actually makes sense to. Or you are trying to improve the UX of something that already works that way and you don't have time/budget/permission to reengineer more thoroughly.
Where it makes sense to the “technological hackery” isn't pointless: where the UX pain can't be easily removed the visual hackery at least reduces it to a minimum. Similarly for when you are stuck with the overall design (at least for now) and are trying to minimise the suck for the user.
I'll not disagree with going fancy and adding blur filters & whatnot is showboating, I'm firmly in the function over fancy tricks camp too, but many people want things to look pretty as well as be functional¹. And once you are already doing the functional, the few small tweaks to make it prettier are hardly hard work so don't waste enough time to deserve the level of incredulity you are expressing, so while I might not bother I'd not judge others for doing so as long as the fancy doesn't get in the way of the function.
--
[1] heck, some will judge your work on the visuals before even thinking about the functional matters
[2] or take more time than refactoring the UI to remove the need for the modal, if that is possible/practical
There was never a more obnoxious showboaty in-your-face modal dialog than the OPEN LOOK popup notice (as implemented by XView and other toolkits that I won't mention out of shame), with its pointy triangular tail, that would actually violently "warp" your mouse pointer location back and forth between the originating button and the "OK" button:
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/volume-7a-xview/9780937...
https://www.oreilly.com/api/v2/epubs/9780937175873/files/bg4...
https://guidebookgallery.org/articles/facetofacewithopenlook
https://guidebookgallery.org/articles/facetofacewithopenlook...
https://guidebookgallery.org/articles/facetofacewithopenlook...
Open Look modal dialogs were so disruptive they must have been inspired by the Chest Burster scene in Alien:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdBu6VAESeI
The one thing OPEN LOOK did get right were the pushpins. It annoys me to see so many "modern" half-assed semi-skeuomorphic pushpins that instead of actually pushing in just remain in the "not pushed in" state, but highlight a framing box instead. It's in the name, people. It's supposed to pin the window on the screen, and how can it do that it it's just highlighted instead of actually pushing into the hole? Pushpins REALLY should safely and satisfyingly push in, not just sit there sharply pointing out at you menacingly like that. It's not rocket science so I don't understand why so many pushpins don't push in. Was there a user interface software patent on pushpins that push in?
That's what thumbnails and stubs are for.
> In fact, you can make a link open modal with left click but open in new tab with middle click. I think it is the most balanced way in my opinion.
Cool. How do I "middle click" on my phone? Left click is "open resource" by default. If a webapp doesn't have a damn good reason to overwrite the browsers default behavior, it shouldn't.
And "we thought it would make the design really pop", is not one of those reasons.
Try long press and open in new tab.
Besides, open in modal don't even mean the url won't change. Fb, reddit both open in popup AND change the url. Copy the url to other browser would just work as intended.
It is already a resolved problem in my opinion.
It was a resolved problem before that, by letting the browser do what the browser is good at, instead of implementing new UI paradigms on top of it.
> Besides, open in modal don't even mean the url won't change. Fb, reddit both open in popup AND change the url.
So I add more code, and thus more complexity to websites, in order for the browser to behave in the way it would have already behaved in the first place, had I not thrown the modal in there, and instead let it work as intended.
This is not correct. Normal users have learned that if they copy that URL thingie, and send it to someone else, that someone else will see the same thing they see now.
I don't know how many times I've received a link from someone saying "lol look at this hilarious dog" and ended up on some useless overview page completely devoid of hilarious dogs. Because some fucking designer decided to do exactly what TFA is complaining about.
I can think of 2 very good reasons right away:
1. It increases the complexity of the webpage
2. It makes it impossible to simply download or integrate the resource elsewhere
Tell that to my non-techy spouse and her +1400 bookmarks. You know what her most recent rant was about? That she cannot bookmark certain timetables at a booking platform she uses. Why? Because guess what: The timetable shows in a modal.
> The modal is about not losing the current place for the user.
Resources opening in tabs also don't lose the place of the user. But you know what modals do usually lose the user? The ability to interact with anything but the model while it's open. A usual gem is a form which opens a modal, where I would then really really like to copypaste some info I already entered in another part of the form, but can't, because the effing modal is in the way. So I have to close it, and that usually wipes all the info in it.
> "Dont open a modal" in cases where the user is likely going to get lost in a detour otherwise is bad advice.
If a web design can cause the user to get lost in the first place, then the problem isn't that there is no modal, and adding one will likely not fix it.
I've made multiple websites where URLs are routed to modals because the app made most sense as pages on top of an underlying state. GET /things/42/edit loads thing#42 in the background and opens the edit modal prefilled with thing#42's info.
A more obvious example is /login and /register in a modal, a cherry on top if logging in or registering doesn't reset app state if the user decides to register halfway through a task.
Preserving form data during navigation is something you have to consider for any form, even forms on the same page or separate pages where you don't want the form to clear when the user navigates away. One key design principle of modals is to make them mentally cheap to open/close/reopen, and modal state preservation is usually a part of that.
That cherry on top can be just as easily implemented by opening the /login in a new tab. Auth gets set, there, user is logged in even in the old tab, and doesn't lose his position in the page either.
Added cherry on top of that: If the user decides to log into the page halfway through the application, he can still bookmark the login page.
The same is true for almost every other use case of a modal where it displays a resource.
Tabs are builtin capabilities of the browser. Even terminal browsers like w3m support tabs. Why built something else that can be built poorly, instead of using what the browser already can do?
There is no other kind. The whole idea of modal window is stupid. It constrains the user instead of empowering them.
Solve the server's problems some other way that doesn't impact the user.
These days almost everything is a single page application so instead of opening a modal window just expand the button that would have opened the window inline instead.
> One key design principle of modals is to make them mentally cheap to open/close/reopen
Cheap for whom?
In this current age, this usually means an SPA that will first load the underlying page, then the entire application bundle, start up the JS, detect the route, load the data for the modal over another request, and finally display the modal. In the multiple seconds this is happening, nothing indicates that a modal will be opened. Sounds familiar?
Yes, and the same can happen with any number of other things, like a keybind that scrolls back, or a link in the feed the user accidentially clicks.
Which is part of the reason why infinite scroll falls under the same category as modals as far as I am concerned. There is a reason why pages with lots of entries are paginated.
I don't think it's a good argument, you could also just use your own argument against you: Pages are only easy for developers but worse for users since you don't have to polish the UX in the way that a modal lets you. It's for developers that don't want to have to think about UX optimizations and defer everything to out of the box browser experiences. Which, granted, might be the best choice for everyone who doesn't want to think about UX.
But I find that to be an empty claim.
> These days almost everything is a single page application so instead of opening a modal window just expand the button that would have opened the window inline instead.
That is often a good choice. However, sometimes a modal makes more sense for an all-or-nothing task, or when the user is already in one of those "expando" forms, or a number of other occasions worth pondering for your app instead of dismissing modals without discretion.
Knowing when a modal does and does not make sense is part of a good intuition about UX.
[0]: It is even easier to not use a mouse, when you are using an assistant. With a keyboard and VO you can resize, drag and drop and do many more activities.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/voiceover/mchlp2746/10...
AFAIK, VO+Command+Return can be used to select multiple things, not to click. For example, in the file viewer (Finder.app, similar to Nautilus/explorer.exe), it is similar to pressing Control (win/linux) and the left mouse button when the cursor is over a file to add it to the selection.
Edit: To open a page in a new tab in a Firefox with stock VoiceOver, I need to press VO+Shift+M to open context menu (aka right-click menu), and then select an option from the list (by greping, using arrows etc.).
I know several non-technical people who find the distinction between window and tab difficult to manage for instance. As well as people who have had Android mobiles for years and still don't understand those three little buttons at the bottom of the screen: back, home, 'task' list.
No, because in the one that intrinsically works, you're losing the user's context by navigating them away.
Which is what the modal is good for.
Whether that's worth it is a discussion, but at least this part of it is trivially easy to implement.
We're talking about BOOKMARKS, so what context do we lose? The users browsers home screen?
By default, Command-Return, no VO key, opens a focused link in a new tab behind the current tab. It's not a VoiceOver-specific keyboard command. It also works in Firefox and Chrome.
However, by default, Safari does not focus links when pressing the Tab key, you need to go to Settings > Advanced and check "Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage" first.
Funny enough, a page-refresh is usually what happens, after I fill in a login form that appears in a modal.
But even if it doesn't do that: If the page is reachable without logging in, then what relevant information is there on the page to display to the user that is both so important that it immediately needs to appear on login, and so unimportant that it doesn't justify requiring a refresh?
And on the off chance that the use case actually requires that, what specific advantage does a modal confer over two input fields (Username, Password), tucked discreetly along a "Login" Button into the navbar?
For example, a username/password in the navbar can make a lot of sense. If it's slightly more complicated than that, like if login has multiple screens (e.g. 2fa token, maybe SSO), then a modal can make sense.
On a mobile screen, having username/password in your hamburger slide-out menu isn't automatically superior to extracting it into a modal.
> If the page is reachable without logging in, then what relevant information is there on the page to display to the user that is both so important that it immediately needs to appear on login, and so unimportant that it doesn't justify requiring a refresh
I can think of a lot of examples where this can polish the experience.
Once again, I'm brought back to the airline checkout process where you might have almost finished booking a flight but you want to get flight rewards and autofill your contact info at the last step and realize you want to log in.
Games are another example -- I've built a modal-based UI for a large casino where there's always a round-based game going on. Guests can watch it. They can login to play. Deposit, FAQ, player profiles, game history, etc. are all cheap interactions that users can view and dismiss while participating in the global game without losing their state. At any moment they can login which enhances most of the pages with additional content.
Fwiw, I'm arguing that modal should be a tool in one's UX toolbox, not something you use all the time.
d: Represent resources only as standard hypertext documents.
h: Progressively enhance with nonstandard features. The traditional
affordances of hypertext will remain available—for example,
middle clicking to branch browser history.
k: But screen readers can’t middle click.
a: Branching is afforded by *some* interface though, right?
w: Not on touch screens.
a: Not even by using the touch interface?
w: Nope. You can’t expect everyone to know how to use it.
Personally I’d prefer us to prioritize building a web of addressable resources rather than applications, and to the extent that our user agents aren’t meeting our needs, improve them rather than work around them.
Most of us are in no position to improve our user agents only large organizations like Google or Mozilla can do that. In fact calling them user agents is extremely misleading in most cases.
If they were genuinely user agents they would obey the user not the server. They would assist the user to a much greater degree than they do now; for instance there is no native way of saving the rendered page in either Firefox or Chrome so sharing a page is exceptionally difficult if the URL points at a resource that require logging in and also risks that the resource changes before the recipient can read it. One has to install an add on to do that and hope that the author doesn't get bored of maintaining it or piss off the Chrome Store or whatever it is called.
Second: in physical space: ramps are required to be implemented in a way that supports wheelchair use. Yet they create alternative affordances: I have appreciated them when when I have broken a limb, for example, even though they weren’t “intended” for that. They are clearly mostly used by delivery people; not only does it make deliveries easier, but reduces incidents of injuries, strains etc.
The same applies to web sites: cleaner affordances allow people to use the page in ways not imagined by the designer.
* By imperfectly I don’t mean “not hyper vigilantly”, I mean that it is often observed in the breach; sometimes it can have negative effects (consider the Berkeley videos case), etc. But that is much better than no attempt at all.
Only for governments or businesses that are open to the public. I've rarely worked on those type of websites. But plenty of B2B stuff. There's a ton of it.
It is painful that some managers, architects or developers might think this way. Accessibility is not just for disabled people, such as the blind or those who have lost a limb. In the kitchen, for example, it is great to have push to open drawers (e.g. based on IKEA's EXCEPTIONELL [0]). If your hands are dirty, you can still open the kitchen drawer without getting anything else dirty. And this is just one example of accessibility.
Personally, I see screen readers as an additional tool (like Copilot or ChatGPT) to be used on a daily basis by keyboard users.
Screen readers can also help you, even if you are sighted. For example, with a ShortCat.app [1] I have a system-wide ace jump [2] with a command list. I don't have to use the mouse to move the cursor - I have a keyboard for that. But in applications that are not compatible with screen readers, you can only choose "close", "minimise", "maximise" buttons, and the first option - close - is the best for such an application (e.g. Sublime Text).
In other cases, SR/SA will read the text for you. If you are too tired to read, or your hands are occupied with a sandwich or utensils, you can use SR to read an article or paragraph for you.
[0]: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/exceptionell-drawer-medium-with...
I'm also reminded that people use screen readers or other assistive tech for non-disability reasons. Like increasing font size when tired or when using a website in a foreign language. Plus, building assessible websites may be required by law, such as ADA requirements in the US.
[1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/57340/percentage-of-s...
99.99% of accessibility things are covered if you just follow normal, established software development practices. Unfortunately, a lot of software developers overcomplicate things, for example by adding modal dialogs to websites. Modals are common and established design patterns in desktop apps, but not so in web and mobile apps. Applying one environment's UX patterns to another is asking for trouble.
This isn't quite true, when you get into things like using aria attributes. I definitely wouldn't put it at 99.99%. And I think a lot of vendors of accessibility software get to skate where others would have their feet held to the fire. They could be doing more to make their software easier to use and for developers to make it accessible.
I used to work as a contractor for the CDC, so I have experience in web development that is held to a higher accessibility standard (we had an actual real person who would verify our work and certify that it was accessible.)
Some things that come to mind are color contrast ratios where you have to pass different levels (AA vs. AAA) https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
And being able to navigate a site with a keyboard, or announce when sections change. That stuff isn't automatic. It might be baked into whatever framework you're using, but those frameworks have bugs too.
Here's an example I ran into with React Native, and it's still not clear if they ever fixed it or if it just got closed as stale: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/27989
And even if you have no empathy so you don't give a shit about anything unless it affects you directly (in which case UI design isn't for you), then consider that unless you die young or have supernaturally perfect health, you're going to need accessibility features yourself some day, so your lazy anti-accessibility attitude is going to come back and bite you in the ass.
And you're dead wrong that accessibility necessarily worsens the experience for people without disabilities. It's useful for everyone.
Please leave the user interface design to other better educated more compassionate people, and stick to the back-end yourself.
I haven't found a single case where improving accessibility doesn't also result in a meaningful improvement for some set of users who don't need accessible features. There is absolutely no good reason not to make things accessible. Heck, I'd make an app accessible even if I had irrefutable proof that it had no users who need it to be accessible.
Non-bugginess is also accessability, but I don't see a law saying that you can't release unfinished software. So how would accessability be anything more than all the others unimplemented issues stuck in the backlog?
Not any more. In the US this hasn't been the case for years since 2019 [1], and in Europe a similar requirement will take power in 2025 at the latest [2].
There is no choice any more if you cater to either markets: either you're compliant or you can and will get fined to oblivion.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-10-07/blind-pers...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Accessibility_Act
E.g. ADA (Americans with disabilities act) website compliance which seems to be required when the employer has more than 15 employees
However, consider how much do you worsen the experience of the majority, and how much do you improve it for the minority? I think that should factor into this decision.
I think the article is mostly trying to make an effort to inform people of the options available to them, so that when you are creating estimates of the work required to support accessibility requirements, you're not overestimating out of sheer ignorance.
If adding support for accessibility delays their product delivery, or raises their costs, it's another tradeoff that might even kill their product. And then it wont be a case of the software not being accessible to those needing those features, but it not being accessible to anybody.
Sure, where the law mandates it, they can always do a half-ass job to be, in name, compliant. But full (or proper) accessibility will be judged in the end like any other feature decision.
You might consider those features essential, but you'd be surprised how many business features get cut to get something out, even more so for an MVP.
If you think those designing most websites and apps people use are made by "more compassionate people" who'd jump on such features out of ethical concerns, you'd be quite off.
Heck, this very website (HN) has a quite bad accessibility track record even considering the average website. Among other things: image elements do not have [alt] attributes, form elements do not have associated labels, links do not have a discernible name.
And this is from a major VC company with tons of resources, and a place where thousands upon thousands of devs frequent.
So, while everybody can get their "morally superior and empathetic" rocks off judging the parent, the reality is more like what's described above. It isn't bad if somebody points to the reality - or to the hypocrisy, if we're to see it ethically.
Put my remarks in the context of a startup that has a limited runway and needs to choose between working on something that would appeal, entice and attract the majority of their target user base and trying to accommodate the needs of the fraction of the same. You can "boo" all you want, but their choice will be obvious, as it should be perfectly understandable, even for people from the second group.
> Please leave the user interface design to other better educated more compassionate people, and stick to the back-end yourself.
Ah, a gratuitous personal attack, the best way to strengthen any argument.
And anyway, a lot more people would regularly and happily use screen readers if it weren't for all those badly and lazily designed web sites and user interfaces that use modal dialogs and don't bother supporting accessibility, which make them much less useful and accessible for everyone.
Speaking of context: Even if screen readers or people with disabilities did not exist, there are still many important legitimate reasons not to use modal dialogs, and still many perfectly reasonable alternatives, so your bogus statistical argument for using modal dialogs is still dubious and doesn't address any of those other issues.
https://ddiy.co/web-accessibility-statistics
>Here are the numbers regarding how many people have disabilities that make accessibility features necessary when surfing the internet.
>4.9% of U.S. adults have a vision disability with blindness or serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses, requiring screen readers.
>5.7% of U.S. adults are deaf or have serious difficulty hearing.
>10.8% of people with a disability have a cognition disability with serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions.
>There are an estimated 300 million people in the world with color vision deficiency which requires color-adjusting tools on sites.
>About 16% of people who use screen readers have multiple disabilities.
>Roughly a quarter of Americans with disabilities (26%) say they have high-speed internet at home, a smartphone, a desktop or laptop computer, and a tablet compared with 44% of those who report not having a disability.
>18% of US adults report that they have a disability, according to this survey, which asked respondents if any “disability, handicap, or chronic disease keeps you from participating fully in work, school, housework, or other activities.”
>Americans with disabilities are three times as likely as those without a disability to say they never go online (15% vs. 5%.)
>By 2050 nearly 2.5 billion people are projected to have some degree of hearing loss and at least 700 million will require hearing rehabilitation.
>By 2060 the number of people 65 or older is expected to double to 98 million.
Another point is that screen readers aren't only useful for blind people. Here's a demo of a screen reader that I implemented for reading the long but amusing catalog object descriptions in The Sims ("Simplifier" demo starts at 3:15), that's useful for kids who aren't good at reading yet (but want to learn while playing a game), and anyone who is too impatient to read all the tiny text on the screen:
Demo of The Sims Transmogrifier, RugOMatic, ShowNTell, Simplifier and Slice City:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8
Also check out the "talking pie menus" and tool palette in X11 SimCity (aka open source Micropolis):
X11 SimCity Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA
OLPC SimCity Demo:
SCOTUS rejected hearing the case and has let the 9th circuit decision stand for now. That means the ruling ONLY applies in areas of the US that fall under the 9th circuit. Further, if SCOTUS chooses to hear the case in the future, they may well overturn the 9th circuit decision.
As they point out in that article, this decision would instantly make hundreds of thousands of business non-compliant and open them up to being destroyed by accessibility lawsuits.
A megacorp will just do the work and write off the expenses.
Small businesses are different. Faced with tens of thousands in expenses, they have two options. The first is that they eliminate their website entirely. This hurts them and almost all of their customers (including disabled people who might have relied on the partially accessible features). The second is to lay off employees to pay for the work. Neither option is very good.
Ah, thanks. I'm German, I thought federal court orders were binding for the whole country.
> Small businesses are different.
Actually small businesses are exempt. The EU EEA has a threshold of 10 employees/2 million euros balance, and the US ADA - at least from a quick Google - of 15 employees [1]. If you're hitting either of these thresholds, you're large enough to afford a once-off expense and hell, you should have a couple tens of thousands of dollars in reserve anyway simply because your employees rely on you being able to make payroll even if disaster strikes - even at 10 employees and 3000 dollars per employee in total cost, that's 30k in payroll a month total so you should have 60k in reserve anyway.
For those who don't, well, please don't operate in a way that externalizes costs and risks onto others - no matter if it's disabled people, your employees or your customers.
> Faced with tens of thousands in expenses, they have two options.
A lot of small businesses don't do their own website, they use social media or SaaS providers - Wix, Wordpress, Jimdo, or (for restaurants) Just Eat and their competitors. For them, the SaaS provider does the heavy lifting, and besides: these sites usually don't have much content anyway.
[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/ada-primer-small-business...
Please make some effort when refuting the arguments of others. See "target audience" in the part that you quoted? That's the keyword.
If one's making an augmented reality app that assists car mechanics in repairs, what would you say be the percentage of screen-reader wielding people there?
> And your claim that accessibility "worsen[s] their [non-disabled users] experience" is flat out wrong
For one, you are taking it out of context. For two, you keep repeating something as if it would make it true.
Here's a little exercise - consider what it would take to make https://finviz.com/bubbles.ashx page accessible. Then, consider what the target audience here is and ponder the choice of working on things that would benefit said audience (i.e. improving their experience) and refactoring the page to be compatible with screen readers. That's what I was referring to in the original comment. It's all in the context, it depends.